War Party Inc. Rages At WikiLeaks

Foreign Policy, Glenn Beck, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, War

Here’s how you know the Republicans are the enemies of liberty and justice. Not a word have their megaphones among the media said about “the deaths of tens of thousands,” often at the hands of our forces, revealed in the release, by WikiLeak, “of over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.”

FoxNews focuses on the obscure Iran-extremism connection. Fox would never jeopardize an occupation.

The Washington Times took the side of the administration by choosing to belabor its warnings about the potential harm the truth could do “to those that are in our military, those that are cooperating with our military, and those that are working to keep us safe” (namely the networks of criminals, terrorists, and warlords we are nurturing in that blighted part of the world).

Similarly—and predictably—The War Street Journal zeroed in on the administration’s hunt for a culprit, “Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst charged this month with leaking [the] classified information”— “thousands of military documents published Sunday by WikiLeaks.

I had to switch Glenn off; his sermons sans information are fit for packaging in a cheap, motivational DVD box set. But no, I heard nothing from him either that would indicate that he favored pulling back the curtain to show the facts of this war.

In fascistic fashion, other NEOCONSERVATIVES called for the arrest of the founder of WikiLeaks. “Julian Assange, once described as the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel of cyberspace, is uncompromising in his scrutiny of big business and big government.”

Kudos to Rachel Maddow’s program which told it like it is, with no regard for Obamby’s feelings.

“The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.”

“THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ BEGINS TO EMERGE FROM THE SHADOWS,” writes war correspondent Eric Margolis.

And that’s a good thing.

Court Rules For Kosovo (Liberation Army)

Foreign Policy, Islam, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, UN

Our friend Nebojsa Malic appeared on Russian TV (fronted by American and British women) to discuss “the predictable and shocking” “decision of the International Court of Justice, made public on July 22, that the unilateral declaration of independence by the provisional government of Kosovo did not violate any applicable rule of international law.”

Read his complete analysis, where he states that “‘If there was one consistent theme to the U.S. position, it was that the Serbs should lose’ : Americans and Europeans [have insisted] that the integrity of Croatia and Bosnia trumped the Serbs’ right to self-determination. Yet when it came to Kosovo, the ‘principle’ shifted again, so the rights of Kosovo Albanians trumped the integrity of Serbia! … ‘If there was one consistent theme to the U.S. position, it was that the Serbs should lose.”

RT:

‘Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege’

Affirmative Action, Education, History, Labor, Race, Racism

JAMES WEBB is a good guy. So I’ve said for some time—ever since my correspondence with him during the dark days of the Iraq war, when I was THE ONLY antiwar writer on WND, and was cursed and threatened daily for it. Webb, of course, opposed the war. We exchanged friendly emails, which he initiated pursuant to one of many anti-war-on-Iraq columns I had written.

Citing Pat Buchanan, this courageous man has now come out against “government programs to help all ‘people of color'” as “unfair.” Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, Webb argues as follows:

“After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. [A point upon which I expand in my new book.] These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived. …

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. But the extrapolation of this logic to all “people of color”—especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S.—moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites.”

The clearest example of today’s misguided policies comes from examining the history of the American South. …

At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that “fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery.”

The Civil War devastated the South, in human and economic terms. And from post-Civil War Reconstruction to the beginning of World War II, the region was a ravaged place, affecting black and white alike.

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt created a national commission to study what he termed ‘the long and ironic history of the despoiling of this truly American section.’ At that time, most industries in the South were owned by companies outside the region. Of the South’s 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a mirror of the population, which was 71% white). The illiteracy rate was five times that of the North-Central states and more than twice that of New England and the Middle Atlantic (despite the waves of European immigrants then flowing to those regions). The total endowments of all the colleges and universities in the South were less than the endowments of Harvard and Yale alone. The average schoolchild in the South had $25 a year spent on his or her education, compared to $141 for children in New York.

Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks’ average of 10.6 years”…

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Demographic Diversity In Borrowing, Again

Affirmative Action, Business, Economy, Journalism, Multiculturalism, Racism, Regulation

Building On yesteryear’s willful errors, the Orwellian named “Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010”—“the 2,300-plus-page conference bill which is designed to protect households from predatory practices by banks, subprime lenders, brokerages and other financial intermediaries”—entrenches yet more affirmative action in lending, the kind that contributed to this depression.

The fecund female who has set-up the same pigment-based privileges that guided state lenders Freddy and Fanny is Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. Carl Horowitz’s Townhall column is extremely edifying (this is the kind of comment I will read on Townhall because it does vital shoe-leather journalism. Ditto Malkin’s work; she does the footwork. The punditocracy’s ignorant opinions I don’t bother with):

“… The measure, in addition to giving the U.S. Treasury the authority to liquidate banks that pose a threat to financial stability (a mixed blessing at best), all but exempts lenders from shutdown if black and other minority borrowers account for high portions of their loan portfolios, especially in minority neighborhoods. The bill states: ‘The orderly liquidation plan shall take into account actions to avoid or mitigate potential adverse effects on low-income, minority or underserved communities affected by the failure of the covered financial company.’ In other words, federal bank examiners should make every effort to keep a failing institution open so long as it underwrites lots of mortgages to the kinds of borrowers instrumental to the disaster in the first place!

There is more. The amended bill would create a Financial Stability Oversight Council headed by the Secretary of the Treasury to consider a struggling financial institution’s ‘importance as a source of credit for low-income, minority or underserved communities’ before any takeover. The measure also would establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion within each of the Treasury Department, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Securities & Exchange Commission, and the Federal Reserve System. Rep. Waters’ amendment is explicit: ‘Each agency shall take affirmative steps to seek diversity in the workplace of the agency, at all levels of the agency.’

All of this looks like quota legislation, even if Rep. Waters can’t quite bring herself to admit as much. And although these diversity-or-else offices wouldn’t be vested with formal enforcement powers, one can be sure that the Justice Department, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other agencies with a civil rights mandate will find every pretext possible, however flimsy, to crack down on lenders whose practices create disparate impacts by race.”

MORE.